Please Pray for Our Free English Classes Christmas Party Outreaches at IPC-Ealing

Hi Friends, December is such a wonderful time for Gospel outreach to our friends and neighbours! Please pray for our upcoming Christmas Parties with our students from our Free English Classes outreach at IPC-Ealing next Tuesday evening and Wednesday morning. Nearly all of our students are new to the U.K. and many of them are coming from various world faith backgrounds including Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism, or no faith background at all. Students have been invited to bring along their families to the party as well, and we hope that this will help us and our volunteers and teachers (all are IPC-Ealing church members) come into contact with even more people to share Christ with. We will also be sharing the story of Jesus's birth narrative from the Gospel of Luke at the party.

Please pray that we would have fun, make good connections for the Gospel, and that we would continue to be able to follow up with students for evangelism, discipleship, and one-to-one & small group Bible studies. We will also be holding four different Christmas Carol outreach events at the church later this month, as well as running a Christianity Explored course at the church in January, which we'll be announcing at the parties and extending personal invitations to students to come along with us to.

Thank you for your continued prayers and partnership!

Thanksgiving in London

Happy belated Thanksgiving everyone! We've had a busy few days of life and ministry between Home Group, a trip to York for Presbytery on Friday and Saturday, and a very full day at church yesterday, so sorry we're just now getting around to posting this. On Thursday evening our Home Group Bible Study celebrated a very international take on an American Thanksgiving Dinner with guests and dishes from around the world.

Even though Thanksgiving is celebrated in several countries other than just the U.S., including Canada and Brazil, the United Kingdom is not among them. In fact, many British people and many other nationalities often don't know much about Thanksgiving or why we celebrate it. So because of Thanksgiving's origins and orientation toward thanking God for the blessings in our lives, it’s a really great opportunity to talk about Jesus. Before dinner Dawson gave a very brief explanation of the origins of Thanksgiving and a short devotional from Psalm 100 before praying for our meal.

This Thanksgiving will be especially memorable for our family as we gathered together with our regular Home Group members as well as a few non-Christian friends who we’ve been getting to know and reaching out to from our Free English Classes outreach. Please continue to pray for our Home Group Bible Study and for our outreach to international friends through Free English Classes.

Please pray especially for non-Christian friends Parham (Iran), Adil (Pakistan), Benson (Hong Kong), Dmitri (Russia), and Francesco (Italy) as Dawson meets with them weekly to read and discuss the Gospel of Mark one to one. Please pray also for growing Christian friends who we are meeting with regularly as well for one to one discipleship, including Eduardo (Spain), Zuri (Brazil), Justin and Zuko (both from South Africa), Fenno (Kenya), Amirreza (Iran), Yuki (Japan), Prateek and David (both from India), Dawid (Poland), as well as many others, and that the Lord would continue to open doors for new opportunities for evangelism and discipleship through Free English Classes, church, Home Group, and the Ealing community.

Happy Independence Day From London!

A holiday greeting and some lighthearted nerdy humour to all of our friends and loved ones back in the USA: Happy Independence Day, known colloquially in the U.K. as “Tuesday”. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to go back to work now!

Happy Easter From London!

Happy Easter everyone, Christ the Lord is risen today! This year our oldest son Joshua decided to start an Easter Egg Hunt for the children at IPC-Ealing. It was completely his idea and he approached our pastor, Paul Levy, to get his blessing, purchased all of the eggs and candy, and got the word out to the church. It was fairly low key, but everyone had a lot of fun with this new tradition at IPC-Ealing.

2023 Year End Update

As we approach the end of 2022 and close out our first year in London, we wanted to post our year-end letter here for any who may not have received it already through post or email to give you a review of how the Lord has been at work over the past 12 months, and what our hopes, prayers, and needs are going into 2023. Thank you so much for all of your prayers and partnership this year, and wishing you all the best to you and yours in 2023!

"I thank my God in all my remembrance of you, always in every prayer of mine for you all making my prayer with joy, because of your partnership in the gospel from the first day until now." -Philippians 1:3-5

Happy Thanksgiving American friends! In honour of all of our friends back home in the States I thought I'd post this classic Thanksgiving throwback pic from our days with RUF in Martin, TN in 2013 when our babies were little and my beautiful bride made her very first Thanksgiving Dinner all on her own without the help of parents and in-laws, grandparents, aunts, or cousins!

While we've thoroughly enjoyed getting to know the different holidays here that are part of British culture that we don't have in the U.S., Thanksgiving is absolutely one of our favourite holidays back home in the States, maybe even more so than Christmas! But here in the U.K., today is just....Thursday. Our kids are in school all day today and no one here (except fellow American expats) gives a thought about stopping everything to gather with family and friends and consume massive amounts of roast turkey, ham, dressing, mashed potatoes, gravy, cranberry sauce, and all the rest (that's just a Sunday roast dinner here). And just forget about pecan and pumpkin pies, and American Football!

So, American friends, we are counting on YOU to flood our newsfeeds today with pics and videos of family gatherings, full plates, football, parades, autumn decor, deer hunting, and all the rest that Thanksgiving entails for you and yours! We will celebrate as a family on Friday when our kids have a day off from school, and we have an incredible "American Thanksgiving" Feast planned with our church House Group Bible study after worship on Sunday afternoon. So have a big slice of pumpkin pie in honour of the Beans in London, and don't go easy on the whipped cream!!!

🇬🇧 Tea with the Queen... 🇬🇧

 

....Or at least as close as we'll ever get! Today begins The Platinum Jubilee and HRM Queen Elizabeth II's official birthday celebration commemrating her 70 years of rule and 96 years of life. So to celebrate in solidarity with our host culture we enjoyed a pot of tea and watched the celebration of the "Trooping the Colour" parade at Buckingham Palace from the comfort of our living room!

The annual celebration of the Sovereign's birthday, traditionally celebrated each year in early June (no matter when the sovereign's actual birthday falls) is the most patriotic time of year in the United Kingdom and celebrated with parades, flyovers, fireworks, street parties, and a four day weekend complete with Union Flags and bunting.